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All the hubub about ChatGPT made me think a lot about Trurl's poetry machine from The Cyberiad. Especially Nick Cave and others declaring it the death of creati

by mcv 3y ago

All the hubub about ChatGPT made me think a lot about Trurl's poetry machine from The Cyberiad. Especially Nick Cave and others declaring it the death of creativity, compared to the protesting poets from the story.

johngossman 3y ago
Me too. And I recently learned that Calvino wrote an essay that included the idea of a poetry writing machine. Now I'm super curious whether Lem got the idea from Calvino, vice versa, or whether it was independently invented by each. I know they read each other. https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androids/ https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androi...
- mcv 3y ago
  My theory is that he started with some silly poems and wrote the rest of the story around them.
- lioeters 3y ago
  The idea of an artificial person goes back to pre-science ("magic"), ancient history and mythology. > Arguably the oldest known story of something approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. In it, Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden handmaidens to help him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork”. > ..In her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor describes how ancient cultures explored the idea of artificial life. Ancient Greeks were skilled in metalwork and mechanics and created a great deal of automata, including a puppet theatre that could perform an entire play. The idea of a poetry-writing machine can also be traced back in history, hinted at in the Kabbalah, or machines of ancient China. (Source?) In the work of Leibniz, "On the Combinatorial Art" (1666), he explores: > The main idea behind the text is that of an alphabet of human thought, which is attributed to Descartes. All concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations of letters. > All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this alphabet would provide a logic of invention..
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
gattr 3y ago
When I got older, I realized the sneakiness here (shortening and quoting from memory): > Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results chose only the important bits as inputs for the learning process, otherwise it would take too long...
- ajuc 3y ago
  He almost described prunning :)
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Seems to me more like selection of entries in the training corpus than pruning.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      Yeah, more like curated training.
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    or as William Goldman summarized it, poetry is compression
MichaelMoser123 3y ago
yes, however both Trurl and Klapaucius were also robots. In the story it is machines creating machines to describe meaning. I think Lem really liked recursion. (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.)
- KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
  > (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.) "Be brief" may just be associated with the speech patterns accociated with a shorter way to say stuff. So it's still the same autocomplete, just steered in another direction.
  - MichaelMoser123 3y ago
    looking at the prompts in https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts Now i am a bit sceptical of this whole prompting business, still some of it is doing something (otherwise people would not put their work into it) Also not clear to me how this steering of the automcpleter in another direction is working.

by mcv 3y ago

johngossman 3y ago

Me too. And I recently learned that Calvino wrote an essay that included the idea of a poetry writing machine. Now I'm super curious whether Lem got the idea from Calvino, vice versa, or whether it was independently invented by each. I know they read each other. https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androids/ https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androi...

mcv 3y ago
My theory is that he started with some silly poems and wrote the rest of the story around them.
lioeters 3y ago
The idea of an artificial person goes back to pre-science ("magic"), ancient history and mythology. > Arguably the oldest known story of something approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. In it, Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden handmaidens to help him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork”. > ..In her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor describes how ancient cultures explored the idea of artificial life. Ancient Greeks were skilled in metalwork and mechanics and created a great deal of automata, including a puppet theatre that could perform an entire play. The idea of a poetry-writing machine can also be traced back in history, hinted at in the Kabbalah, or machines of ancient China. (Source?) In the work of Leibniz, "On the Combinatorial Art" (1666), he explores: > The main idea behind the text is that of an alphabet of human thought, which is attributed to Descartes. All concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations of letters. > All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this alphabet would provide a logic of invention..
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

gattr 3y ago

When I got older, I realized the sneakiness here (shortening and quoting from memory): > Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results chose only the important bits as inputs for the learning process, otherwise it would take too long...

ajuc 3y ago
He almost described prunning :)
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Seems to me more like selection of entries in the training corpus than pruning.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Yeah, more like curated training.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  or as William Goldman summarized it, poetry is compression

MichaelMoser123 3y ago

yes, however both Trurl and Klapaucius were also robots. In the story it is machines creating machines to describe meaning. I think Lem really liked recursion. (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.)

KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
> (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.) "Be brief" may just be associated with the speech patterns accociated with a shorter way to say stuff. So it's still the same autocomplete, just steered in another direction.
- MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  looking at the prompts in https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts Now i am a bit sceptical of this whole prompting business, still some of it is doing something (otherwise people would not put their work into it) Also not clear to me how this steering of the automcpleter in another direction is working.